


La Familia

by sesame_seed



Category: Chronicles of Chrestomanci - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-10
Updated: 2012-12-10
Packaged: 2017-11-20 20:29:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/589339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sesame_seed/pseuds/sesame_seed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Millie falls ill, and the Castle falls apart. Written for Yuletide 2007, for <a href="http://kyrafic.livejournal.com">Kyra</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	La Familia

Chrestomanci's wife, Millie, caught the sniffles on a Tuesday. On Thursday she was stricken with a bad cough, on Friday complained of headaches, and by the time Sunday rolled around, she had taken to bed with a bout of low-grade fever.

Cat was not greatly bothered by this development at the outset. Illness was no stranger to Chrestomanci Castle, and with Cat's unfortunate brand of luck, he had seen more than his share of bright syrups and funny-colored pills during his residence.

"Golly," said Julia, as they took turns cosseting Klartch in the herb garden, "I do hope she'll recover in time to take us to the Fair as she promised. It would be dreadful to miss it."

The Edinburgh Technology Fair ( _Mystical Marvels! Stunning Sensations!_ ) had been a topic of much excitement among the children since its announcement, and Janet in particular had been set on attending. She hoped, she said, to see whether some of the exotic treasures it hosted came from her own world.

"Won't Chrestomanci take us, if Millie can't?" she asked now, twisting her curls anxiously.

"Daddy doesn't like fairs, and he won't allow anyone else to take us either if Mummy isn't there to insist."

"Perhaps we could go on our own, by bike," said Roger. "Joe and I came up with a splendid new method of controlling the external combustion engine so that it won't keep catching fire one out of every five times like the last--"

"I don't think Chrestomanci will allow us to go past the front gates on those bikes," Cat intervened very quickly, "much less to the fair." Having no urge to spend an entire day among incomprehensible gadgets, he thought it well to head off any new schemes that involved close contact with the pride and joy of Roger's life. His own curls were still growing out after the last test run.

"Genius is always underappreciated in its time," Roger said sadly to Klartch, who warbled in commiseration.

***

As it turned out, nobody was thinking about the fair by the time its multi-colored flyers arrived.

"Daddy, is Mummy _really_ ill?" Julia asked at the ninth dinner they had shared without Millie's usual reassuring presence at the table.

Chrestomanci looked annoyed. Over the past few days, he had relentlessly shot down all attempts to bring up illness at the dining table. This time, however, he said, "No, Julia, she is not--as I am sure you already know, else your hiding behind the door as Doctor Dimwit declared it would seem a spectacularly pointless activity."

"Dimmock, sir," Tom, the secretary, murmured.

"That is what I said."

Despite the prognosis of the esteemed Doctor Dimmock, however, it was soon apparent that Millie's condition was not taking a turn for the better, and could in fact be observed to be going sharply in the opposite direction.

"Come now, lovies, don't make that face," she said as they gathered by her bedside to say good night. She smiled at them, but the smile had a washed-out quality to it, as though it were there but not _quite_ managing to hold on, which extended over her entire person.

"Yes, Mummy," Julia and Roger chorused, while Cat and Janet said, "Yes, Millie."

 _Get better,_ Cat thought at her with all his might, standing by the bed with his fists clenched underneath his over-long pajama sleeves, where nobody could see them. _Get better, get better, get better._

He did it only to have something to do, and not because he held out much hope for its effectiveness. Sometimes he was capable of willing people to good health--he could manage headaches and the common cold pretty well--but more serious illnesses proved beyond him. There seemed little doubt at this point that Millie's trouble was not a minor one, but when he finished his internal mantra, she did look just a bit ruddier, he thought--though that could have been a trick of the lamplight.

Then the door opened and Chrestomanci entered, more sober than usual in a slate-colored dressing gown lined with navy-blue silk, the embroidery so restrained that Cat almost missed it.

"Off with you monkeys," Chrestomanci said, looking as though his irritation had increased by several levels of magnitude since dinner. As the children filed out, he continued, "This is becoming really inconvenient. You might have a little consideration for the rest of the household, Millie, and recover as soon as possible."

As the last to leave the room, Cat was in time to catch, in Millie's low, pleasant voice, "Stop being an ass, Christopher. No matter what you may suppose, it isn't attractive."

"I am _always_ \--" Chrestomanci said, sounding highly indignant, and then the door clicked shut.

***

With Millie bedbound, little blunders and hiccups seemed to be popping up everywhere in the castle. One day Janet was missing her favorite ribbon; the next, Mary the maid tripped over a step and spilled an entire tray of breakfast-things onto the floor. The cook was flustered by a mouse _just_ as she was adding salt to the soup, spoiling the entire pot, while Roger managed to sit on one of his most delicate contraptions and ruin both it and the seat of his pants. Though Millie's presence had not been greatly remarked in the day-to-day running of things, her absence made itself felt.

What was even worse, in Cat's eyes, was the huge row that erupted between Janet and Julia. It made the situation amongst the children almost as wretched as when Julia and Roger had thought Janet Gwendolen, Cat's real and largely unlamented sister.

It was all due to that idiotic fair, Cat thought irritably. Janet had been going on about it, even while the rest of the household fluttered around Millie's condition, and been imprudent enough to mention it in Julia's presence. Janet, though a lovely girl and ten times nicer than Gwendolen, could be rather tactless at times.

"I think it's selfish of them not to allow us out, when there's nothing we can do here to help," she'd said, kicking at the thick rug on the playroom floor. "I was so looking forward to finding out if any of the collectors knew what's been happening on my world since I've been gone. We could go perfectly well on our own, on Roger's bikes, or Cat could teleport us all."

There was a bang as Julia dropped the book she'd been scowling at for the past half hour. It made Cat and Janet jump, and one of the teacups gave a startled whine of _I belong to Chrestomanci--_ before trailing off.

"I don't want to go anymore. Roger doesn't either, and Cat never did. I think it's selfish of _you_ to think of going off to have fun while our mother is--is indisposed. You're just a nasty, self-centered little girl."

Janet turned crimson--partly from shame, but partly also, Cat was aware, from anger. She was not the type to let insults pass without comment. "Better than being a nasty, self-centered little girl who can't even make a table dance without help from Roger," she retorted, with a toss of her head.

"As if you could make anything dance at all," Julia snapped, punctuating her words by sending the entire tea-tray dancing across the room to hover above Janet's head. Cat silently willed it to settle harmlessly on the ground beside her. Julia shot him a glare, but Janet paid it no attention at all.

"No, I'm not special enough to have magic, because nobody in my world has any magic at all, and if something happened to _my_ mother, they wouldn't be using magic to cure her. And I would never know about it!"

Janet paused there, mouth twisted, and Cat realized with a pang of guilt that she really was worried and unhappy about the family she had left behind. She had dismissed her parents with such aplomb when first stranded in their world that Cat had dismissed them as well, but it was clear, now, that however happy she was in Chrestomanci Castle, the lack of any contact with her old world must wear at her.

Julia seemed to realize it, too, and for a second looked embarrassed, before she stood up in a huff and, with a stomp of her foot, flounced out the doors towards the east wing, leaving her book sprawled sadly on its spine.

Without speaking, Cat went over and put it back in its place on the bookshelf. Then he looked at Janet, but didn't go to her. He was not good at comforting people.

"Everything is perfectly horrid," Janet said at last, not looking back at him, before storming out the doors to the west.

***

For the next two weeks, Julia ignored Janet and Janet, Julia. They both refused to speak to Cat.

"It's because you didn't stand up for her," Roger explained as he worked a fractious screw into the latest metal contraption. Cat had fled to the work shed, finally, despite his usual indifference to the place; it seemed that he was always stepping on toes indoors. Most of the staff were touchy, and needed little excuse for an outburst. Chrestomanci in particular seemed intent on making everyone's life as difficult as possible, finding fault with everything from his clothes to his food to the way the morning paper was laid on the table: the servants took care to keep out of his way, though Cat was beginning to wonder why one of them did not simply come up from behind him with a vase and crash it over his head.

"But I didn't stand up for either of them!" Cat protested. He had settled atop a closed toolbox, elbows on his knees and chin in his hands, ostensibly watching Roger and Joe Pinhoe do their work, though it made as little sense to him as the current situation.

"Ah, that's why they're both mad at you," Roger said sagely. "--Here, pass us a wrench."

He obliged, and asked, "Are you mad at me, too, Roger?" feeling that he would not be greatly surprised if the answer were affirmative.

Roger seemed to give this question more consideration than was flattering. "Not to speak of," he decided, after a minute's rumination.

That was when the contraption exploded.

"Blimey, we must've missed a step," Joe said as he and Roger both hurried around dousing flames, and soon neither of them were paying any attention to Cat at all. Cat left the work shed wondering if he would have preferred Roger to be mad at him, after all.

He took refuge briefly with Syracuse in the stables, burying his face in the horse's glossy mane, and Syracuse nudged his head and nibbled on his ear in a most comforting fashion, but when Cat tried to materialize a peppermint from Julia's private stash, he found a protective barrier erected over Julia's room, with a magical signature the equivalent of a KEEP OUT sign plastered all over it. Cat could probably have broken the barrier if he wished, but given the current state of affairs, it hardly seemed a prudent idea.

Syracuse's nibbling became much less affectionate after that.

In the end, having disappointed and been disappointed by Chrestomanci Castle and its surrounding grounds, he willed himself to Ulverscote and Marianne.

Lessons were suspended as Millie's illness worsened and everyone with magical ability in the Castle, including Michael Saunders, their tutor, had been roped into researching a cure or at least a proper diagnosis. This meant that Marianne no longer had an excuse to come to Chrestomanci Castle during the weekdays. She seemed genuinely happy to see Cat, which was such a balm after his recent experiences that Cat found himself pouring out all his woes and grievances of the past few weeks.

Marianne was sympathetic. "That sounds dreadful, Cat. Is Millie truly that badly off? I'm sure you know that Mum and everyone are doing everything they can to help--the family's pretty handy with medicinal herbs, you know--but nothing so far seems to be working."

Cat hadn't known, and felt ashamed. He remembered seeing various Pinhoes popping in and out of the castle grounds, but that was hardly uncommon; he hadn't paid it any attention. He suddenly became conscious that, with Millie indisposed and most everyone else distracted, the Pinhoe connection could hardly have been visiting for the usual reasons.

"I don't know what they can do, though. Chrestomanci's been putting almost all of his power into getting Millie well again, and it's not doing any good at all." He didn't mention his own attempts to do the same.

"Well, but Chrestomanci is only an enchanter, isn't he?" Marianne said. "He doesn't know _very_ much about dwimmer, or charms, or--I should say there are many avenues of magic that he isn't expert on. Haven't you noticed that when he sits in on our lessons, he never corrects Michael on Magical Theory, though he'll do so for everything else?"

Being a dunce at Magical Theory himself, Cat hadn't noticed--he was caught up ordinarily in a gloom at the pointlessness of learning such things when he could _do_ everything he needed to--but Marianne excelled in the class, and he trusted her appraisal of it.

"That's terribly nice of your family," he said, staring down at his hands. "I didn't realize they cared so much."

"Idiot," Marianne said, not at all sharply. "Nobody likes to see Chrestomanci in a temper, and I've heard that this affair has put him so out of sorts that they are thinking of naming the next discovered species of Ogre after him." Cat nodded with vigor. "Besides, Millie's a darling. I know Mum and Aunt Prue think so, and even Aunt Helen agrees, though she doesn't say so. And Dad hasn't grumbled about you lot at all since she fell sick."

"I wish you could come back," Cat said. "Julia and Janet have turned the place into a war zone, and Roger and Joe just tinker on their flying machines like nothing's the problem. It's--" lonely, he didn't say, "--unsettling."

"But that's all happened before, hasn't it?" Marianne stated with the certainty of someone who knew well all the parties involved. "It'll blow over soon, I'm sure, same as it always does."

Cat nodded, even though he disagreed. In the past, Millie had been there, and though she rarely forbade them from fighting outright, she had a way of making quarrels seem amusing and unnecessary.

Besides, he couldn't think of a way to tell Marianne of what he truly feared: that Janet would realize she had made a mistake in coming here, and ask Chrestomanci to find some way to send her back to her own world. The little girl posing as Janet in that world might have to come here, then, but Cat had already exchanged one sister for another in the past couple of years, and the notion of going through it again made his head hurt.

Perhaps, he thought woefully, he was just doomed to have extremely bad luck in sisters. But there was no way to talk to Marianne about this without explaining to her what the quarrel had been about, and he didn't think either Janet or Julia would have wanted that.

"I hope it does," he said instead, and they spent the rest of the day playing new versions of a magical cat's cradle until it was dark and Cat had to return to the Castle for dinner.

***

Afterwards, Cat tried to pay closer attention to the visitors to the Castle. There were many of them, now that he'd stopped to take notice, men and women dressed in strange garb and speaking in the glib but unnatural accents of translation spells. Some of them glanced around in haughty disdain; some came with anxious eyes, while some looked sympathetic.

Chrestomanci would take each of these guests into his study, and sometimes, if Cat hung around long enough, he would see the door open and Chrestomanci lead the guest towards Millie's room. He observed that it was usually the anxious or the sympathetic ones that were given this treatment, though occasionally a couple of the haughty ones were taken as well. The others were firmly shown out the Castle by Miss Bessemer.

Tonino and his brother, Paolo, were two of those who got to see Millie, but they seemed unable to help.

"It is not like an ordinary malady," was all Paolo could say--a little timidly, because Chrestomanci at this point looked rather like a fine-feathered bird of prey ready to pounce. But though his lips curled briefly as if he were preparing to be sarcastic (and Chrestomanci could be _very_ sarcastic when called upon, as Cat knew quite well), in the end he merely sighed and ran a hand through his gleaming cap of hair, so that it fell around his hair in untidy wisps.

That was when Cat knew the situation was dire.

"Thank you for trying," was all Chrestomanci said as he led the two boys away. Before they turned off the corridor and quite disappeared from sight, Tonino turned to give Cat a small, half-hearted wave.

***

At dinner that night, Chrestomanci made a surprising announcement.

"Tomorrow, my mother--that is your great-aunt, Cat--will be arriving at Chrestomanci Castle for an extended stay. She is coming for two reasons: firstly, as an accomplished enchantress, to see what she can do for Millie, and secondly, as the reigning matron of this family, to help keep the household running smoothly while I am busy." His lips assumed that cruel, beautiful curve again. "I know you will all be eager for her company."

Around the table, the expressions had turned queer, though in different ways. Julia and Roger were the least restrained, looking as though they'd bitten into lemon sours simultaneously, while Janet seemed to have forgotten her ongoing war against Julia long enough to direct an inquisitive gaze between them. Tom had evidently been aware of this communication beforehand, and was just as evidently resigned to it; his eyebrows had a faintly martyred droop to them, while Miss Bessemer's mouth was screwed up tight, as if to keep disapproving words from dropping out.

A great-aunt had not, hitherto, figured in Cat's view of the universe at large, and he wondered why nobody had mentioned her before. He wondered further how Chrestomanci would act in her presence: it was impossible to imagine him behaving as Julia and Roger did with him, alternately respectful, dismissive and sometimes apprehensive.

"What is she like?" he whispered to Roger as they filed out of the dining room together. Janet tried to sidle closer while not appearing to do so until Julia gave a loud and unladylike snort, upon which Janet tossed her head and quit the room with chin almost perpendicular to her spine, while Julia sniffed and left in the other direction. "Oh, dear," Cat murmured.

"Girls are silly, aren't they?" said Roger. "Anyway, you'll see. We don't like her and she doesn't like us, but at least that means we don't see each other often. She never remembers our names."

"Chrestomanci forgets names himself," Cat felt obligated to point out.

"Yes, but that's different--he knows so many people it's impossible to keep track of them all. Anyhow, he doesn't forget _ours_."

Cat wondered if he ought to call attention to the fact that Tom, who took care of Chrestomanci's correspondence, never seemed to have such memory problems, but refrained from doing so as Mary and Euphemia passed by, deep in what seemed to be a dispute over who had broken the Castle's best tea set.

At least living in such a deeply magic-steeped domicile had its occasional uses, as the tea set was in perfect, shining condition the following day, laid out in the drawing room with afternoon tea when the footman announced Mrs. Chant's arrival.

Miss Bessemer gathered them all up ("Come, children, and be smart about it-- _do_ straighten that collar of yours, Roger,") and they were led hurriedly to the foyer, where Chrestomanci and a very elegant lady had just finished exchanging a formal embrace.

They straightened up, and the lady turned towards them.

The first thought that crossed Cat's mind was that she was quite the grandest grandmother he had ever seen. She wore a gray silk traveling suit, furs, smart buckled shoes, some items of understated but very expensive-looking jewelry about her person and a pretty little hat adorning her head. Her skin was pale and very fine; her eyes large and dark; and there was no trace of silver in the brown hair peeping out from beneath the brim of her hat.

It was immediately apparent from whom Chrestomanci had inherited his looks, and equally as obvious where he'd acquired his absorption in them.

She seemed overjoyed at the sight of the children and advanced with arms outstretched. "Robert!" she said to Cat, and "June!" to Janet, in a sweet, thrilling voice. "Darlings, you appear marvelously well. You're in such better looks than last we met--one would hardly recognize you."

"Apparently so," Chrestomanci said, "as you haven't recognized them. Roger, Julia, come over here and let your grandmother get a better look at you than she did last time. This, Mother, is your grand-nephew Eric and this is Janet Chant, my ward. I am happy to see you approve of her, as I recall that you were not much taken with the adoption when informed of it."

Mrs. Chant looked for a moment nonplussed but recovered admirably, altering her course with only an infinitesimal hitch. "Oh, what a terrible mistake--Rodney, Jessica, you've grown up splendidly as well." She smoothed a quick hand over their hair; their expressions went so blank that for a moment their resemblance to their father became impossible to mistake. "And Christopher--" her gaze, passing from Janet's face to Cat's, showed a flash of unexpected shrewdness, "--you never told me why you chose to take a ward. Of course, given the circumstances, it is perfectly understandable. Your Papa's side of the family was always indiscreet."

Cat peeked at Janet to see if she understood what these circumstances were better than he did, and found her peeking back at him. For a moment, at least, they were in perfect, puzzled accord.

From behind them, Miss Bessemer drew a breath that sounded as if she did understand the implications and wasn't pleased with them in the least. "If I may take your coat, Mrs. Chant?" she said, bustling up past Cat and Janet. Mrs. Chant's attention was momentarily diverted by the necessity of giving very careful instructions regarding the treatment of her furs.

"You see?" Roger said as the children slipped through the corridors towards one of the remoter wings, doing their best to escape notice in unspoken accord.

"Well, I'm jolly glad she isn't my granny," said Janet. Cat wondered if she were missing her own grandmothers, no doubt dressed less fabulously and capable of telling their grandchildren from strangers, and felt a pang.

"You needn't criticize our relatives," Julia snapped, but added immediately afterwards, "She never stays long," as though to point out the bright side of things.

***

Having Mrs. Chant running the household was nothing like having Millie in charge. As Janet said scornfully, she was a "lily of the valley who toils not, neither does she spin". She seemed, furthermore, to have put up the backs of all the servants with whom she had come into contact over the last few days.

Chrestomanci responded by shutting himself up in his study, making Cat wonder why he had agreed to have her over in the first place. Chrestomanci was not, he thought, the type of person who would shy from putting a stately dowager in their place, even if the dowager in question were his own mother. Janet drew criticism early on despite the first favorable impression she made by being "insufficiently ladylike," while Mrs. Chant seemed to mourn Julia and Roger's lack of "significance." Cat was pronounced "too quiet, but promising, given extensive polish," which so alarmed him that he took to spending his days out in the stables with Syracuse and Klartch, an area in which Mrs. Chant deigned not to venture.

Dinners became awkward affairs. Cat could tell that everyone was taking pains to stay on their best behavior, but it felt rather less congenial than the usual rapid-fire spate of incomprehensible conversation. He took to sitting as still as possible in his chair and trying to will himself invisible (though not, in a lesson learned from experience, hard enough for it to actually work--the sight of a knife dancing over the tabletop of its own accord had not improved appetites)

Mrs. Chant seemed to find the meals just as deficient as Cat. She ate with the finicky motions of Cat's namesake and was charming to everyone, though she continued to play havoc with their names--an occasion common enough in the Chrestomanci household, but Cat was beginning to mark the difference of which Roger had spoken. Chrestomanci's memory lapses left one irritated at him and wondering, occasionally, if he'd been dropped too often on the head as a baby, but at the most he made one feel that one was unimportant to him. Mrs. Chant could make one feel simply unimportant.

It became clear, moreover, that she did not care overly for Millie. "You're going simply careworn, Christopher. It's a pity the dear girl has no family or connections of her own in this world," she would say with a sniff. "You remember how difficult it was to divert attention from that fact at the wedding."

"As her connections consisted of a multitude of worshippers from a highly martial society, we decided against inviting them in consideration of the banquet budget and potential repairs," Chrestomanci would reply, ending the conversation and casting a pall of silence over the dinner table until the next course arrived.

One positive effect of Mrs. Chant's arrival, however, was that it prompted a ceasefire between Janet and Julia by uniting them against a common enemy, and they allowed Cat to join in the truce with an air of gracious magnanimity.

"She won't even let us see Mummy anymore," said Julia, tying a wrathful knot into her handkerchief. "Catching, indeed. I hope she catches it!"

"She must have a considerable amount of magic, though," said Cat, eyeing the handkerchief. "Nothing you've tried so far seems to have worked."

"She can't possibly have any more of it than Chrestomanci, or she would be Chrestomanci instead of just Chrestomanci's mum. If there's nothing that Chrestomanci can do, what's the use of having her here?"

"The only use I can see is that _she_ gets to swank about, with Mummy out of the way," said Julia.

The door opened at this point and Roger stumped into the room. He'd been incensed, too, ever since his flying bicycles were designated life-threatening hazards and banned from further exploitation in the tyranny of Mrs. Chant's reign. ("Roger, dear, you don't want to worry your poor mother when she's in such a delicate condition, would you?")

"I heard the old bat talking to Michael," he announced with the mien of a casket bearer. "She thinks it would be 'ever so ideal' if we were sent off to boarding school, to be spared the hardship of worrying about Mummy and to lighten the staff's workload."

After a moment of shocked silence, Janet was the first to speak. "As if she isn't a load of work herself!"

"Well, if that isn't the meanest thing she's come up with yet," Julia said. She looked ready to tear her handkerchief in two.

Cat said nothing. He had frozen quite still in alarm. In the short span of his life he had lost his parents, been nearly murdered by his sister, gone to live with the most powerful enchanter in the world, and narrowly escaped the clutches of another powerful and evil enchanter, but in the course of all these events, he had never once been threatened with the prospect of boarding school.

"But how did Michael respond?" Julia was asking. "Surely he wouldn't agree. I heard him tell Mr. Stubbs that she was one of the persecutions God placed on the world, as a trial for mice and men."

"It doesn't matter if Michael agrees or not as long as Daddy does," Roger said. "And he's been so fed up with everything lately that maybe, you know...maybe he would think it best if we weren't underfoot all the time."

They looked around at one another with white, miserable faces.

"We have _got_ to get Millie back," Janet said finally, sounding a little lost.

Visions swarmed before Cat's eyes: he saw Millie gone, and Janet gone (because although Janet was not Gwendolen, she nevertheless possessed in full Gwendolen's bold willingness to change situations when they didn't suit her); he saw himself packed off to a dingey school with hundreds and hundreds of other boys, all dressed identically and with identically blank expressions.

"Let's do it, then," he said firmly, and when they turned to him in question, he shared with them the beginning of an idea.

***

It was easy to set up the initial portion of the plan, because Cat was a nine-lifed enchanter, and had moreover lived under the roof of another nine-lifed enchanter for two years.

"Bugs," Janet had said as they gathered around in her room--it being the largest--and then, when Roger and Cat gazed at her uncomprehendingly and Julia looked around in alarm, "Oh, Cat, do you remember what Mr.C did with the mirror in this room? Can you duplicate it, do you think? Only, you know, with sound."

She had taken to calling Chrestomanci by various aliases when they were involved in activities that tended towards the less legitimate side.

"I can try," said Cat, "although I don't think Chres--Mr. C's magic and mine are very much alike."

He thought for a bit, and focused his attention on the photograph of himself and Janet that stood upon her dressing table.

In the photo, she wore the first outfit of her own that was not a leftover from Gwendolen, and she was looking very pleased and pretty; he was smiling as well, but in a stiff, awkward fashion, as he had found it difficult to simulate delight while looking into a confusing apparatus being operated by a stranger.

With a bit of effort, he pushed that memory aside. He thought instead of his own room, with its curved walls and large window and chest of drawers that had a deep scrape down one side due to a Klartch incident, where his own copy of the photograph stood. Staring at photograph-Janet's beaming face and photograph-Cat's uncomfortable one, he concentrated on how interesting it would be to listen in with _that_ Cat-and-Janet's ears instead of their own, which they had been using for months and months already, after all.

Photograph-Cat looked at him with languid indifference, but photograph-Janet took quite kindly to the idea, and with a quick surreptitious push from Cat, she turned her attention away from her immediate surroundings and towards Cat's bedroom.

"There's nothing to hear," she said in disappointment after a while, making Roger and Julia and the real Janet jump. Her voice was Janet's, too. "Mean of you, getting me excited over nothing."

"We'll have to test it out," said the real Janet, quickest to recover. "Wait here, kids," and she flew off out of the room, petticoats swishing after her.

After a few minutes had passed, photograph-Janet exclaimed, "Oh, there's me!" There was a pause, and when she spoke again, there was something subtly off about her speech, as though words and expression were not fully coordinated. "Cat? Julia? Roger? Can you hear me? If you can, the secret word is--jelly doughnut!"

There was another pause, after which photograph-Janet wrinkled up her nose. "Bother, now I'm getting hungry," she said. "I wonder if I would be able to eat, if you photographed me with a plate of biscuits?"

Cat reached out at this point with his magic to whisk Janet back to her own room. Once she appeared, looking startled at the unannounced teleportation and a bit cross with it, too, he said, "Jelly doughnut."

"That's right," said Janet, smoothing down her hair in a way that suggested she was compelling herself to smooth down her ruffled feathers. "Good--so we know it does work." She made a face at herself in the photograph, looking not entirely pleased to be dealing with another double. "And now to decide: which places do we want to spy on?"

"Keep an eye on," Julia corrected her primly. "One doesn't have to spy in one's own household, usually."

"Well, in some--" Cat began, thinking about the tales of royal intrigue and murder they had covered in their history books, only to be overridden by Julia's firm,

"Not in this one."

"Oh, what does it matter what we call it?" Roger rolled his eyes; he had very little patience with rhetorical squabbles. "Let's get on with it."

"Millie's room, of course," Janet was the first to suggest. "They'll probably say things while they're diagnosing her, and there's a family photo we took last year on the mantelpiece."

"And I want to know how Mummy's doing," Julia agreed. "Fancy needing a magicked photograph to tell us that!"

"Also," Cat said reluctantly, when nobody else seemed inclined to continue, "probably, Mr. C's study. They go in there to talk with him before they leave. That's going to be hard, though--I'm sure he must have loads of protections against eavesdropping in there."

"No, whenever Daddy is talking about something he doesn't want anyone else to hear, he just wraps the room up in his magic. Julia and I have tested it out," said Roger, looking unbothered by the admission.

Julia nodded. "He's not likely to ward these conversations, though, so it'll be all right. And there's that hideous portrait of us by that third-rate painter Mummy felt sorry for right across from Daddy's desk, if Cat can use oil paintings instead of photographs."

***

There was usually very little to monitor. "Millie is sleeping," photograph-Janet would say, or "Mr. C is pacing."

When visitors arrived, however, they would all huddle together in Janet's room, in front of the photograph, and listen to various experts give their opinions on what ailing Millie. Sometimes Millie was awake for these, and they sat around in a loose circle just to hear her voice, but more often she was not.

"Brain tumor," said photograph-Janet when the elegant doctor from Switzerland arrived, her voice gone accented and commiserating. "Not a doubt of it."

"Something is draining her magic," she said three days later as the dark-haired, dark-skinned gipsy--Chrestomanci called him a Traveler--made his report, "something that I cannot identify."

"I can't find anything wrong," she said in high, excitable tones the week the witch doctors from across the bay visited, and then, in a deeper voice, "Then make something up--we don't want You Know Who to think he's wasted money on our train fare here."

It was a very long series of weeks. Though the enchanted photographs remained undiscovered, they made little progress trying to piece together the many, varied and often wildly contradictory reports turned in by Chrestomanci's guests.

Once, they accidentally tuned in on Mrs. Chant trying to persuade Millie that boarding school was just what the children were hankering for. Cat felt his heart leap to his throat, but realized almost instantly that he need not have worried.

"I have many fond memories of boarding school myself," Millie had said, her voice weaker than usual but as dry as Chrestomanci's could sometimes go, "but if Julia and Roger have suddenly professed a passion for it, they must have come across a Personality Changing Charm at some point this past month."

They cheered her from Janet's room, and Cat quite agreed when Julia declared Millie the best mother ever.

Millie's lucid patches were growing fewer and further between, however, and on one particular evening, when Janet and Julia had been whisked off by Mrs. Chant to try on new frocks and Roger had taken the opportunity to go slip a secret message to Joe, Cat was sitting alone in Janet's room when he heard Chrestomanci's voice from photograph-Janet's mouth, saying " _Millie_."

It was just a single word, but it was awful. Cat could picture him sitting at her bedside, head in his hands, and shivered, glad that Julia and Roger were not around to hear it. He wondered, in that bleak moment, what they would do if Millie were truly to leave, as Cat's own parents had; he thought then that he would do anything he could to keep the people he had around him.

"My lord, I cannot tell you how pleased I am to contribute my own paltry store of knowledge to such a heart-wrenching cause," photograph-Janet said the next day, in an oddly familiar voice.

This one came from Chrestomanci's study and was preceded and followed by many professions of gratitude and a litany of the speaker's own unworthiness.

"Who is that?" Cat asked her, receiving a strange look in response.

"Mr. C just called him Mr. Baker--didn't you hear? You were right here for it."

"Yes, but that doesn't mean anything," said Cat. He would have waved his hands if he could, but they were wrapped around Klartch, who leaned against him sleepily, crooning a soft tune. "Never mind." He'd just remembered that appearances aside, photograph-Janet wasn't Janet; she was just a lifeless replica, given a bit of life by Cat's own magic. She wouldn't have Janet's memories, nor be able to recognize anything.

"No use asking any version of me, you know how I am with names," real Janet was saying.

"Yes, you _do_ seem rather more likely to be of Daddy's bloodline than either one of us," Julia responded, when Cat remembered from where he'd known that voice.

"You got his name wrong all the time," he whispered, a little struck by the meaning behind his realization. "It's Mr. Baslam."

"Who?" Everyone looked askance at him except for Klartch, who burrowed a little deeper into his side.

"Janet, you remember--the dragon blood dealer. The one Gwendolen owed money to." He rushed over the words; Julia and Roger despised Gwendolen, he knew, and he owed her no more loyalty, but it still pained him sometimes to admit to them her wrongs. Janet was different: she _was_ Gwendolen, in very many ways, and though it would've been an even contest between her loathing of Gwendolen and Julia's, Cat suspected that much of that stemmed from the fact that Janet could see herself in his sister and didn't like what she saw.

"Jumping Jupiter, Mr. C must be desperate to be calling _him_ in."

"I think he is," Cat said, low. "I really do think he is."

***

Their next guest was, thankfully, a more welcome one.

They were on their way to Janet's room when they found him in the foyer, presumably waiting for the butler to carry his card to Chrestomanci. He was a tall man, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a strange device hanging from his neck and a quizzical, rather pleasant smile on his face.

"It's Conrad," Julia exclaimed, more animated than she had been for a long time. "Oh, Conrad!"

She rushed out towards him and would, Cat thought, have neatly bowled him over if Mrs. Chant had not swept in at that very moment in a magnificent dress, polished and glistening to perfection.

"How d'you do, sir," she said. "I assume you are here with an appointment to see my son?"

"I'm here to see Christopher," Conrad said, looking her over curiously. Cat was startled: even Millie addressed Chrestomanci by his title most of the time. "I don't exactly have an appointment--I've been away from home on business for the past few months, and only just received a letter from him dated in June. I came over as soon as I could."

Mrs. Chant received that response with a very slight chilliness. "Chrestomanci is quite busy these days. Perhaps you had better come again when you have settled on a specific date and time."

Julia's breath came out in a hiss, but Conrad's dark brows only quirked upwards. "If Christopher isn't available, then might I see Millie? I'm concerned about what Christopher mentioned in his--"

"Grant!" Chrestomanci's voice rang from the top of the staircase. Cat looked up towards him. He was clad in the same dressing gown he had worn the previous day, face haggard as it usually was these days, but, like Julia, he looked more spirited than he had in weeks. "Well, you certainly took your abominable time."

"I was off taking care of some errands for the King," said Conrad, calmly. "I would have been here sooner if you weren't in the habit of plastering your letters with that god-awfully forbidding crest so that nobody at home dared to open it themselves and check the contents. If they had, they would have contacted me."

"It shows a distinct want of courage on the part of your kinsfolk, if you ask me," Chrestomanci sniffed, but he had descended the staircase and was tugging on Conrad's sleeve in a most uncharacteristic manner. "Come along, she'll be happy to see you."

The two of them vanished off in the direction of Millie's room, which left behind a disappointed Julia, a placid Roger, a Janet afire with interest, and a Mrs. Chant who looked much as one would expect after being so thoroughly ignored by her son in front of a guest.

"Go back to your rooms," she said, quite viciously, when she became aware of their presence. She did not seem such a model of glossy perfection when she was angry.

Cat, at least, was only too happy to retreat to Janet's room, and the others followed without protest. By the time he activated the listening spell on the photograph, however, it was clear that they had missed a chunk of the conversation already.

"--a blessing you've come, dear Conrad. Christopher's been terrifying the household into fits while he's not away."

"I've been a model of decorum and self-restraint." It was funny to hear the ultra-dignified voice Chrestomanci used when he was offended coming from photograph-Janet's mouth. "You can hardly blame me for the timidity of others."

Conrad certainly didn't sound intimidated. "You've spoiled him dreadfully, Millie, and that is one of the reasons why he is so difficult," he said. "And you, Christopher: you enjoy it when people tremble before you. Admit it."

"Gosh, who _is_ he?" Janet asked when Millie only laughed at this, and Chrestomanci snorted but didn't contradict.

"He's Conrad," said Julia dreamily, just as she had been in the days after Jason Yeldham's return and before the revelation of his engagement. "Conrad Tesdinic. He's an ever-so-important personage in his own world, in Series Seven, and he's known Mummy and Daddy for ages and ages. He trained with them here, you know, like Marianne and the others train with us--only he had to leave after a few years, because of course he couldn't stay too long away from his own world."

"Why of course?" Cat asked, feeling a stir of uneasiness.

"Well, because he would have begun to fade away, silly. Everybody knows that."

"I didn't know it," Cat said, but Julia had turned her attention back to the photograph, as Conrad began _his_ process of examination. It seemed, for some reason, to consist of snapping pictures of Millie.

"I feel as if I ought to strike a sultry pose," Millie laughed, though her voice was hoarse.

"You're perfect in any pose imaginable," said Chrestomanci, in a cross, obstinate way.

Julia suddenly bit her lip. "Turn it off, Cat," she said. "Please."

Cat had wanted to find out what Conrad would say about Millie's condition, but stopped the spell without argument. Julia's ordinarily pale face had gone even more alarmingly so, and she looked as if she were on the verge of tears; her hands, in sudden fists in the folds of her dress, showed white at the knuckles. Roger was staring at the thick carpet. Janet made a few attempts at lightening the mood that fell rather flat. They dispersed shortly afterwards.

***

Cat was in the midst of skulking off to join Syracuse in the stables when he came across Conrad turning a corner with a stack of photo negatives in his hands--came literally across, in fact, as he tripped over Conrad's foot to bruise his chin on the floor.

"Careful there, old chap," Conrad said, helping him up. Cat rubbed a little resentfully at the scraped skin; as if everything else weren't going badly enough. "No bones broken?"

"No," Cat said. He snuck a quick look at the negatives, but they were quite impossible to make out from his current angle.

"Could you point me towards the library, then? I'm afraid I've gotten a little turned around. It's funny, you'd think having lived here six years would have engraved the blueprints of the place into my mind, but I swear it's different every time I visit."

Cat nodded and started heading towards the library with Conrad at his heels.

"Are you one of the students learning magic along with Roger and Julia?" said Conrad as they walked.

"Yes," said Cat. He would normally have left it at that, but there was something about Conrad that made him seem very easy to talk to. "I am their cousin."

"Oh!" This time, it was Conrad who tripped, though it was only a short stumble. "So you're Frank and Caroline's child? Christopher's spoken about you a bit--Cat, isn't it? Or would you prefer Eric?"

Cat nodded again. "You can call me Cat, if you want." Mrs. Chant never did, but then, he wasn't sure if he wanted her to. "Did you know my parents?" he couldn't stop himself from asking.

"We met," said Conrad, looking a little embarrassed about it, "at one of Christopher's receptions." Cat remembered that his father and Chrestomanci had not seemed to get along very well.

He didn't say anything further, and neither did Conrad, until they pushed open the library's thick oaken doors.

"Thanks awfully," Conrad said then, dropping his burden on one of the round reading-tables in the room and looking around at all the tall shelves in a rather hopeless manner. "You've been a great help."

This was Cat's cue to leave, of course, but he found himself hanging back and smoothing out a lump in the carpet with his feet. "Mr. Tesdinic?" he said.

"Do call me Conrad," said Conrad, with an engaging smile. "What is it?"

"Conrad," said Cat, with some secret relief; it was always difficult to call people one thing in your head and another to their face. Distractedly, he wondered why Chrestomanci chose to call Conrad 'Grant.' "Is it true that people from other worlds begin to fade if they're removed from their world for too long?"

Conrad blinked at him out of warm black eyes. He was very like Chrestomanci in figure and coloring, Cat thought--not quite as good-looking, perhaps, but far more approachable. Cat would never have dreamed of asking Chrestomanci a question like this upon meeting him, and even, indeed, after some few months as a part of his household. Conrad felt like the kind of person you wouldn't mind appearing silly before.

"Yes, that's quite true," he said. "It's why your classmates from other worlds have all had to leave after a few terms, as Julia and Roger might have told you. It upsets the natural balance of things when souls go missing from one world to overpopulate others."

That was in line with what he'd heard, and it made his stomach clench tight. "So, if Janet--she's my sister's double; she came over into our world when my sister got tired of it and moved to another--she's been here for two years. How much--how much longer does she have?"

Conrad stared at him. "Good lord, have you been worried about that?" he said, and looked vexed. "Christopher is the worst person in all the worlds to explain things, I've always thought, but surely your tutor--look here, though. I know a bit about Janet. She may be from another world, but she's still from Series Twelve, or she wouldn't have your sister as a double."

He went on to explain about the different series and the sets of worlds that comprised them, drawing diagrams on a table with his finger, until what had always been a fuzzy concept in Cat's mind took on the straight, clean lines of logic.

"It is much less of a strain for people to travel between different sets of the same Series than to hop to another Series entirely. I have never heard of anybody physically suffering from it. So you see, you're in no more danger of losing Janet to off-world sickness than you would be, say, your Great-Aunt."

It felt as if a weight had dropped from Cat's shoulders. He found himself smiling up at Conrad gratefully. So Janet would not be fading away, and now that she and Julia had patched things up, she wouldn't want to go back to her old world, either, he hoped. He knew it was very selfish of him, but that did not lessen his relief.

"Thank you," he said. "Oh, thank you."

"No need for thanks. I know myself how alarming it can be to affected by certain fields of magic while understanding very little of them."

Since that summarized quite neatly the entirety of Cat's childhood, he found himself agreeing wholeheartedly. "It would be nice," he said, a bit wistful, "if everyone could just stay put in the world where they are and not be running off all the time."

Conrad grinned back at him. "To a degree, I'm sure, but if it were true all the time, I would never have met Christopher--and as exasperating as he can sometimes be, that would have been a shame. Come to think of it, Millie would never have met Christopher, either, and then where would young Julia and Roger be?"

"Millie?" said Cat, not understanding, though a recent memory drifted up of Mrs. Chant mentioning over dinner that Millie had no connections in _this_ world.

"She was originally from Series Ten; didn't you know? Came to Twelve as a child to find Christopher, so I've heard. Though I suppose it isn't the sort of thing that is ordinarily mentioned, being less than strictly legal..."

Here, he trailed off, and Cat watched his brows draw together and then his eyes widen.

Cat felt a glimmer of nervousness and excitement himself. "Has she gotten over her attack of," he searched his memory for the term, "off-world sickness somehow?"

"Not that I ever heard of." Conrad frowned again, tapping a restless staccato on the table. "It can't possibly be that particular malady, though. _Someone_ would have spotted it by now. Christopher knows the signs himself. But it doesn't make sense--we never thought about it. I ought to speak to him about this," he finished, mouth firming, and got up to move towards the door.

There was a much quicker way of going about that, of course. Cat opened his mouth to mention it, and then realized that it would be even speedier to just take action on his own.

"Chrestomanci," he said, focusing on the need they had at the moment for his presence and on his own sense of sudden urgency. The door opened half a second later to admit Chrestomanci himself, just as Conrad was reaching for the knob.

"Oh," said Conrad, a little shamefacedly, "I always forget about that."

"What is it, Cat?" Chrestomanci looked taken aback to find himself walking in on a t?te-?-t?te. "I hope you two haven't called me here to announce the formation of an unholy alliance."

"This, from the man whose own unholy alliance spawned children?" Conrad said, rolling his eyes. "But here's a better question for you: what steps did you or Gabriel take to keep Millie from fading away into nothingness as yours truly would have, if I'd been determined to stay?"

Chrestomanci's features assumed for a moment a mask of extreme blankness. Then he said, slowly, as if making his way over uneven ground, "Gabriel did give up one of his lives to appease Asheth, but that was a separate issue. I don't--I don't think we did anything."

"Could that be the problem with Millie?" Cat found himself wriggling a little in hope and anticipation. "Perhaps--perhaps she'll be all right if she takes a vacation in her own world."

"It can't be that." Chrestomanci was giving off waves of vexation, but with a sliver of what seemed the same exhilaration that Cat was experiencing. In one sense, he had told Cat early on, their magics were quite similar, and that was that they worked better by gut than by cold knowledge. Right now, Cat could _feel_ that they were on the right track, and he was sure Chrestomanci was feeling it too. "The symptoms are quite different. She's truly ill, not just diminishing away into a ghost. Anyway, it oughtn't to have taken this long for off-world sickness to claim her, if there was an imbalance in her coming that needed to be rectified."

"Unless," Conrad said, pausing, and then he began digging feverishly amongst his negatives, retrieving a couple from the bottom. Cat could see now that these were developed and showed Millie lying on her bed, dreadfully thin and pale, with Chrestomanci standing beside her.

Only, oddly, there seemed to be a different photograph superimposed above that, or perhaps hidden beneath. It was fainter and less distinct, but in the other layer, Chrestomanci seemed to be clutching one of Millie's hands--one of Millie's four hands. There were two ghostly arms stretching out above her usual ones, and both hands of that pair were clinging tight to the bedspread, as if unwilling to ever let go.

The effect was a disturbing one to Cat, but Conrad seemed to see something brilliant in it.

"It's you. It's been you all along, and her. None of the people who faded away after refusing or being unable to return to their own worlds were nine-lifed enchanters or their mates, were they? And powerful enchanters in their own right?"

Chrestomanci stared at him. "But I haven't," he said, lifting one of his own hands and transferring his stare to it, as if he could find answers written into the palm. "I'd like to think myself aware of where I send my magic at all times, thank you. And Millie's never mentioned it either."

"Perhaps," Cat offered, diffidently, "it started before you were _quite_ aware of where you were sending your magic all the time? I never felt Gwendolen using mine, you know. Not until she admitted to doing so."

For a long time, neither Chrestomanci nor Conrad said anything. It made Cat jump a little when Chrestomanci finally broke the silence.

"You may be right," he said. "I was just learning about magic myself at that time, and Millie didn't even know she was an enchantress. And now that you've mentioned it, several of the quacks I had over to consult with did say that it seemed as if something were draining her magic at an alarming rate--one of them even said that she was doing it herself. Whispered about suicidal tendencies, the numbskull. I knocked the notion out of his head promptly enough."

"It looks as though he was correct as to the effect, if not the cause," said Conrad. He looked as though he wanted to laugh. "I hope you didn't harm the good doctor?"

"Nothing that a dose of his own medicine wouldn't cure," Chrestomanci waved the unknown doctor's injuries away; he was not interested in them. "That could be it, Grant. She's been expending so much effort on keeping herself in this world that her body can't handle the strain anymore. Though it's curious that I haven't been similarly affected."

"You're more powerful, and probably have never been as desperate to keep her here as she was to stay." Conrad paused. "If this had gone on much longer, perhaps you would have ended up bedbound as well, and then the wizarding world would really be standing on its head. I didn't say it earlier, you know, but you're looking rather awful."

Chrestomanci's look of horror and affront was indescribable. He shook himself then, like a dog just out of a lake, and said, determined, "We must get Millie back to Series Ten _at once_."

***

The next couple of hours seemed to pass in a whirlwind of events. Chrestomanci ordered a portal to be opened to Series Ten immediately, and he and Conrad went to tell Millie about what they'd discussed. Mary and Euphemia were given the charge of preparing a suitcase of clothes for a trip in a very hot and arid climate, while Michael and Tom were told to peruse the available documents on Series Ten and prepare a report instantly--sooner, if possible. Mrs. Chant came out demanding to know what was going on and Chrestomanci paused in his rush to say, "I am taking Millie to visit her connections, whose well-being you were so kind as to be concerned about," before disappearing around a corner.

Cat hurried to find the rest of the children and dragged them back to Janet's room.

He spilled out, in a quick, incoherent rush, everything he knew about Chrestomanci's theory, and how he had arrived at it; that if his guesses were correct, everything would soon be well.

Julia and Roger didn't say a word until he'd finished. Then Julia said, "It's funny--of course we knew about Mummy's background, but I suppose we never really thought about it. I mean, she'd always been fine here, so it stood to reason that there couldn't have been a problem with that. I shall be glad to have her back."

Then her lips trembled and she made a strange, low, keening sound, abruptly cut off, as if she had just stopped herself in time from bursting into sobs.

Janet scrambled closer and put her arms around Julia, looking fierce as she motioned Cat and Roger towards the door with her chin.

"I'll just, err," Roger said once they were outside, eyeing each other awkwardly, and then he bolted down the hallway in the direction of his own room.

Cat felt strangely empty. He didn't remember the loss of his own parents very well, and though he had mourned the loss of Gwendolen, the manner of that loss and Gwendolen herself made it a very different affair from what losing Millie must mean for Julia and Roger. There was a difference there, and something about that difference made him uncomfortable.

Not having anywhere in particular to go, he returned to his room as well. Once inside, he turned the photograph of him and Janet around, so that it was facing the wall. He didn't want to see his own fake smile at the moment.

At dinner that night, Chrestomanci and Conrad were conspicuously absent. Mrs. Chant must be in a foul mood, Cat could sense, but she covered it with a veneer of exquisite politeness that dampened spirits at the table far more than any tantrum could have.

Even her most pointed smiles and persecuted sighs couldn't keep an air of festivity from saturating the Castle, however. During the following week, everyone seemed bursting with good cheer, from the scullery maids to the groomsmen, and every day was a holiday. Cat suspected that Millie would be shocked to find half the pantry consumed upon her return, but kept the thought to himself: after the past two months, they rather deserved some celebrating, he felt.

It was, therefore, a rude shock when a torch-waving mob camped itself on the front lawn of the Castle grounds one afternoon.

Miss Bessemer marched out the front door to confront it, followed by Michael, Bernard, and most of the more senior members of the Chrestomanci organization. Cat and the rest of the children were forbidden from going out, but they pressed their faces to the window panes by either side of the door and watched.

"What is the meaning of this?" Miss Bessemer demanded, looking far more like a grand lady than a housekeeper.

"Why, dear madam," said the man at the head of the group. He was dressed in a patched suit and wore an old felt hat. Cat recognized him with a start and a shudder as Mr. Nostrum--Mr. Henry Nostrum, Gwendolen's teacher, who years ago had been behind the plot to disable Chrestomanci and use Cat himself as a sacrifice to open the portals between worlds for all to travel.

Looking out over the rest of the crowd, he caught sight of more familiar faces: the other Mr. Nostrum, the Willing Warlock, the witch who had almost caught Fiddle, even Mr. Baslam, who had not joined with Mr. Nostrum during that first failed coup.

The ones who had been part of that coup had had their magic taken from them, but Cat remembered Chrestomanci saying that lost magic would find its way back, sooner or later, and the new ones might be powerful magicians. Cat began to worry: almost all the staff at Chrestomanci Castle were witches or warlocks, with some degree of magical talents, but without Chrestomanci and Millie, they might not be a match for whatever Mr. Nostrum and his co-conspirators had planned.

"We are here to report a crime," Mr. Nostrum was saying, his smile very amiable even while his swirling eye gave him the look of a sinister Mad Hatter. "A crime of private travel between worlds for non-governmental purposes--and even worse, the illegal harboring of a refuge wanted by the ruling religious body of another world."

He knew, Cat realized. He knew about Millie, and what had taken her and Chrestomanci away. But _how_ \--

And then he remembered Mr. Baslam inside the Castle, and how if Chrestomanci had not, in his distraction, detected _their_ listening spell, there might have been others he'd missed as well.

"What are you saying?" Miss Bessemer didn't look a whit unruffled, but Cat knew that she must be uneasy inside, because the decorative pin that held her bun in place was trembling.

"I am saying that the current quote-unquote holder of office in this Castle has flagrantly flouted his own rules, hopping through worlds for his own selfish purposes. I am saying, Madam, that, by law, the mistress of this household should never even have set foot upon our world, much less done so continuously for decades." Mr. Nostrum's left eye began to whirl even faster; if he could have done it unseen, Cat thought, he'd have been rubbing his hands with glee. "I am saying that if the King should hear of this, he would have no choice but to strip the current holder of office of that office and appoint in his stead somebody who will not bend and stretch the laws he himself upholds whenever it should suit him."

"Are you suggesting one of you lot as a candidate?" Tom said contemptuously, but Mr. Nostrum had evidently been prepared to field this question.

"No, no, I would not have the heart to do so, kind sir." (Janet muttered a venomous "Hasn't got a heart at all," in Cat's ear). "Out of the purest feelings of compassion and forgiveness, we are willing to give the current holder of office a chance to right his wrongs and change his misguided ways. Of course, we would also expect in that case the same treatment in return: a reversal of our previous sentence which, after all, was for a crime not so very different than those your employer himself is guilty of."

"That's blackmail," Miss Bessemer snapped.

"It is an exchange of mutual benefits," Mr. Nostrum corrected her. "Come, let us be frank. Certain of my colleagues have been kind enough to block the portal between this world and Series Ten with a liberal application of certain not-quite-legitimate materials--that, I might hasten to add, your employer is only too happy to utilize for his own purposes."

Cat straightened from the window. He had been worried about this, ever since he recognized Mr. Nostrum; however long a list that gentleman's negative qualities might comprise, rashness and thoughtlessness were certainly not among their ranks. If he had taken pains to assemble this small army at a time when Chrestomanci and Millie were away, he must certainly have been sure to have a plan ensuring against their return.

Still, he tried.

"Chrestomanci," he said, straining to reach through with his magic, and heard Julia, Roger and Janet doing the same, though of course Janet had no magic of her own. "Chrestomanci, Chrestomanci, Chrestomanci."

It was of no use. There was no telling what Mr. Nostrum had done--though Cat suspected dragon's blood played a large part in it--but there seemed to be a thick gray barrier that slammed down relentlessly every time he tried to reach through space to the blazing white presence that was Chrestomanci's.

He was slumping with despair, and Mr. Nostrum was still in the middle of a cheerful catalogue of Chrestomanci's many sins, when a smooth, silken, but nevertheless frosty voice cut through his rather unpleasant one.

Cat lifted his head, and stared.

Mrs. Chant had pushed her way to the front of the Castle personnel, clad in a shimmering emerald gown covered by a lacy white shawl. Her beauty did not stand up as well to the afternoon sun as it did to the cool shadows indoors: the lines on her face sprung into view, marking her as a woman closer to the age of sixty than thirty, but something in her bearing, in the tilt of her chin and the arrogant slant of her eyes, summoned forth the suggestion of Chrestomanci's presence if not the materialization.

"What was that, madam?" Even Mr. Nostrum seemed taken aback.

"I suppose I must repeat myself if you are hard of hearing," said Mrs. Chant. "Were all those hideous things you were saying intended to be in reference to _my son_?"

A low murmur rose from the crowd on the lawn; Mr. Nostrum gave a dry cough. "Ah, Mrs. Chant. Charming to meet you at last. It must strain a mother's heart to hear of the willful wrongdoing of her children, I realize, but I feel it my duty to--"

Mrs. Chant glared at him. It was extremely like Chrestomanci's glare, and Cat noticed many of the assembled magicians draw back a step or two. "Quiet," she said. A breeze swelled up suddenly, sending the leaves on the ground into a frenzied dance and stripping away the rest of Mr. Nostrum's words. "I will not have my son slandered--and to do so on his own grounds! I have never encountered such discourtesy, such _insolence_ in my life."

As Mrs. Chant often said the same about some of Janet's speeches, he snuck a glance towards her to see how she felt about being ousted from her number one position, but Janet seemed wholly enthralled by the scene taking place before them.

There must have been strong sorcerers or enchanters on Mr. Nostrum's side as well, however; the breeze died down as quickly as it had formed, and Mr. Nostrum began again, looking far less amiable this time.

"My dear Mrs. Chant, I'm afraid you do not fully understand the situation. Your son has committed certain reprehensible errors during his term of office, which could have serious repercussions for him if the King should--"

Mrs. Chant had removed one of her lacy white gloves while he was speaking and, before he could finish his sentence, she took up both ends and tied a knot in it.

The wind that swept up nearly knocked Mr. Nostrum off his feet, and effectively shut him up as well.

"Though I do not see what business it is of yours, or of these _ladies and gentlemen_ with you," said Mrs. Chant, icy as a winter queen, "the only sin my son and daughter-in-law are guilty of is that of going on a trip to pay respects to relatives on her side of the family, as is proper. They will return soon enough, and when they do, you will find it wise not to be caught within these premises."

In the silence that followed her speech--punctuated by gusts of wind--there was a clink and then the spread of a pungent, unmistakable smell. Miss Bessemer gasped, and Michael looked murderous. Cat recognized the scent of dragon's blood.

Again, the wind died down.

"As I was saying," Mr. Nostrum said, white-faced and with flaring nostrils, "if the King should hear of the charges against your son, I would fear for both himself and his entire family--indeed, I am afraid that even you yourself might be--"

This time, Cat was waiting for the swell of Mrs. Chant's magic, and when it came he added his power to it. From beside him and around him, he could feel Julia and Roger and the rest of the castle's occupants doing the same. Mr. Nostrum was lifted fully off his feet and remained hovering a few meters above the ground, eyes bulging and no longer having any leisure to swirl.

"I will thank you kindly not to threaten a lady, sir. Moreover-- _moreover_ ," she raised her voice, as Mr. Nostrum looked prepared to shout to make himself heard, "I do not recognize you, but I recognize certain faces behind you. Yes, I see you, Theodore Door, and you, little Willie Baslam. Though I wish it otherwise, I was once under circumstances such that your names and faces are familiar to me." She swept through their ranks with a freezing, contemptuous glance. "In turn, I am sure you will not have forgotten Ralph Argent, my unfortunate brother. I am sure, too, that you will not have forgotten certain of his associates, who still remain free and in power, and will still have the courtesy to grant me a few favors should I have the opportunity to call on them."

Her voice rang on the final sentence of this speech like a doomsday bell.

Cat wasn't sure what it referred to, but it caused the murmur from within the ranks of the mob to swell. Some of them were shuffling backwards, he saw, turning their faces away, as if to escape recognition.

Mr. Nostrum was still blowing about in mid-air, struggling furiously to make himself heard, but Cat kept his concentration on the wind, and anything he managed to gasp out was rendered immediately inaudible.

For a long while, nobody seemed inclined to answer the challenge. Cat stared at Mr. Nostrum's followers staring at Mrs. Chant. They seemed rather aimless, now that their leader had been so summarily overwhelmed. Everything remained at a standstill.

Surprisingly, it was Mr. Baslam who was first to speak up. He looked as if he had come to some decision. "Now, we don't mean any harm, Miss Miranda," he said, his puffy face shining with ingratiation. "We just wanted to deliver a friendly warning to your son, that's all. We were all very sorry about what happened to Mr. Argent, and have only the best wishes for his sister and nephew, of course." He turned and addressed the crowd. "Let's go!" he barked, and like bad-tempered sheep, they shuffled their feet and growled a little before turning as one ragged herd and spilling away from the Castle.

Within fifteen minutes, the lawn was cleared, and only Mr. Nostrum remained, buffeted around like a leaf in the wind, his face now completely crimson.

"You may go, too," said Mrs. Chant, making a haughty gesture of dismissal, and he disappeared from sight with a soft popping sound, leaving only his hat behind. Cat tried not to wonder where she had sent him. He suspected she neither knew nor cared herself. She patted her hair in case the wind had disordered it and, once satisfied, turned with a swish of skirts and petticoats to glide back inside the castle.

"Very well done, miss," Miss Bessemer murmured, and there was a chorus of agreement from the rest of the staff in which Cat found himself joining.

"Those awful men brought it upon themselves," Mrs. Chant said, unknotting her glove now and smoothing it out with some displeasure. "I have regretted Ralph's peccadillos since he came to that disgraceful end, but I suppose there is, as they say, a silver lining in every cloud. Of course," she added, moving over to the children and absently straightening random articles of clothing that had been wrinkled during the course of the day, "I cut all ties with his associates after he was detained as befitting my station, but those common riffraff wouldn't think of that. Tragic indeed, to consider the low society we might once have been forced to keep."

***

So it was that when Chrestomanci and Millie returned home in three days' time, they found everything much as they had left it. The only major difference was that Michael and Bernard had, in the interim, gone through every single room of the Castle and swept them for suspicious spells. Cat had hastened to undo the magic on the photographs before they could reach Millie's room or Chrestomanci's study--which had required very quick work indeed, as they chose the study as their starting point.

It was just after breakfast, as they were polishing off the last of their french toast, when they heard Millie's laughter sounding through the corridor.

"It's Mummy!" Julia and Roger leaped up, with Cat and Janet not far behind, and they rushed in an eight-legged swarm to wrench the door open, and there indeed was Millie, beaming and bright-cheeked, looking as if she had never been sick a day in her life.

Julia and Roger hurled themselves into her arms, and Janet hopped around the tangle of limbs in a circle, clapping and cheering, only to be tugged in by Julia's hand on her wrist.

Cat hung back, waiting his turn, when he caught sight of Millie's merry eyes, and found them full of affection and welcome.

"Come join us, Cat," she said, and he stepped forward and did.

"Well, here's a pretty picture," came Chrestomanci's voice, dry as ever. "Millie, my powers of divination as Chrestomanci lead me to predict your second best coat and very best dress quite ruined by jam, if you will continue to put them within the reach of unwashed hands after breakfast."

"Christopher, shut up," said Millie and Conrad in unison.

But Chrestomanci looked refreshed as well, like a sleek and well-fed feline. He explained to them later what he and Millie had discovered. "Our hypothesis was very much correct. When Millie left Series Ten, she did so in secret, thinking she would be killed if she were discovered. Later, we discovered that the High Priestess of her temple had no more notion of killing her than of playing a piano with her feet, but that did not mean that she could travel back just as she wished--to the people, she was still the former incarnation of their Goddess, and ought to have been put to death immediately upon coming of age."

"Horrid policy," Millie said, wrinkling her nose. "No wonder they can only find children to go along with it. Knowing this, of course I stayed well away from Series Ten after I moved to this world. I didn't know much about inter-world travel--neither did Chrestomanci--but we were both young and proud and, after years and years passed and I showed no sign of any ill effects from my prolonged stay, we both just assumed that we had managed to slip through the rules yet again."

This time, it was Chrestomanci who made a face. "The wrong assumption, as it turned out," he said. "We had reason to believe that Millie would be forced back to her own world to face death when she first came over, under which circumstances it was natural that we would try to use our magic subconsciously to keep her grounded in this one. Even after the threat removed itself, I suppose the compulsion remained, like a habit."

"Especially since the threat never truly removed itself," Conrad pointed out, slouching easily against one of the papered walls. "Even if the Arm of Asheth was no longer looking for her, the laws of the worlds still dictated that she would have to return after a given amount of time."

"So power continued to be diverted to the task of keeping Millie here, which ate up more and more magic the longer she stayed, until her body was left so weak that every stray virus found it an easy job to set up camp and attack her." Chrestomanci frowned his disapproval of this affront on the part of the viruses.

Julia looked up at this, alarmed. "What does that mean? Will Mummy have to go back to Series Ten, after all?"

"No, no, my dear," Millie said, reaching out and giving Julia's hand a squeeze, "you need never worry about that again. Daddy's powers and my own were enough to keep me in the bloom of health here for close to three decades. I'll be visiting Series Ten more frequently in the future, and that ought to be enough to keep the off-world sickness at bay."

They sat around for a while in silence, contentment like a happy glow surrounding the room.

"But you said you had a story to tell us, as well," Chrestomanci said suddenly.

"Oh, yes!" Janet was eager to be the one to share and since nobody cared to contest her for the right, she was obliged in her wish. She told them of Mr. Nostrum's visit and his ultimatums, the appearance of "Mr. Balsamic" in the mob, and Mrs. Chant's surprise routing of them, horse, foot and artillery.

Chrestomanci listened without interruption. Once she finished, he let out a sigh. "I had almost forgotten that chapter in our family history," he said. "I didn't realize she had had any dealings at all with the Wraith, aside from Uncle Ralph himself."

"Who is the Wraith, Daddy?" said Roger.

"Who is Uncle Ralph?" said Julia at the same time.

"Oh, nobody you need to know about yet," Chrestomanci said, looking vague, which meant that a dentist's forceps wouldn't pry answers out of him.

"I didn't expect Mrs. Chant to come through so shiningly, though," Janet added. "She was in an appalling mood when you left, and she's always been criticizing everything about the Castle and how it's run."

Chrestomanci looked neither surprised by the event nor disapproving of Janet's statement. "Mother has her faults, but she is family, after all," he said. "That was why I asked her here, while I was so often away. In the end, it's best to have family look after family," and his vague, wandering glance swept from Millie to Janet and back again, taking them all in.

Cat didn't say anything. There was nothing he wanted to say; everything was almost perfect. He snuggled deeper into the armchair he was sharing with Roger and felt delighted with the world.

"But, oh!" Millie let out a sudden distressed cry, drawing everyone's attention. "The Technology Fair that you poor darlings were anticipating so much. It's over now, isn't it? Did you never get to go?"

"It's no matter at all," Janet said determinedly and Cat could see that she really meant it, but Chrestomanci lifted his head at this moment and blinked.

"Oh, that's been postponed; it won't take place until next weekend. Didn't any of you know?"

There was a silence, and then a chorus of denials, and Conrad saying, "I'd imagine they had other things to be thinking about, this past month."

"But how did that come about?" Millie asked. "There wasn't any huge storm or natural disaster that you neglected to tell me about, was there?"

Chrestomanci shrugged the shoulders of his fabulously tailored suit. "So many of the participants were running back and forth trying to figure out a cure for you that they were quite understaffed, I understand," he said. "Now that you're well, it will, I'm sure, proceed as planned. I can take you all in the car, if you wish," he continued with a beautiful air of martyrdom.

"Hurrah!" said Janet.


End file.
